As high speed transmission facilities are becoming available at attractive prices, it becomes necessary to address the impact of such new facilities on network architecture, and particularly on routing in transit nodes. A high throughput is a key requirement for such nodes (several thousands of blocks of data per second), therefore routing tasks must be performed as rapidly as possible. Similar requirements can also be found in the interconnection of local area networks.
Usually routing in a network is performed by means of tables. This method implies a mechanism to enable a route manager function, which has to be in communication with each routing process, to load the routing tables in every node within the network, and to insure the consistency of their contents when changes occur in the route definitions.
Other methods do not need a routing table in intermediate nodes but imply that the contents of frames be changed by the routing process, or includes a long routing paths address.